{"value"=>"<p>The Martin Luther King Memorial Center records chronicle the founding and early years of the Institute of the Black World, up to and including its separation from the Martin Luther King Center. This series includes the 1968 proposal for the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Advanced Afro-American Studies at Atlanta University Center, as well as proposals, budgets, and other planning documents for the Institute as it developed as part of the King Center, including files from the Institute's earliest advisory and governing councils. Also present are invitations, programs, and press releases from the official opening of the Institute on January 17, 1970, an event entitled \"A Celebration of Blackness,\" which featured performances by the Harambee Singers and Katherine Dunham's dance company. Internal memos, reports, and meeting notes document the rising tensions between IBW and the King Center over the summer of 1970, as well as the subsequent official split in September.</p> <p>Additionally, there are meeting minutes, employment applications, financial documents, press releases, and clippings pertaining to the establishment and early years of the King Center itself, in which Vincent Harding was deeply involved. Multiple files concern the Library Documentation Project, another aspect of the Center, also led by Harding, which sought to collect and preserve the papers of King and other civil rights activists as well as amass a library on the Black experience more generally. Lastly, there is correpondence documenting Harding and other King Center staff's effort to establish a new intellectual journal dedicated to Black affairs.</p>"}